Marketing: AI is rebuilding how you get found and buy ads
Marketing's front door is being rebuilt by AI on two sides at once: how customers find a business, and how a business buys attention. In May 2026 Google handed campaign management to an AI assistant and began placing ads inside its AI answers, while OpenAI opened ChatGPT's ad system to small budgets. At the same time, more people now take an answer straight from an AI instead of clicking a search result. For a small marketing team or agency, the skill you have sold for years is being automated and opened to everyone.
Where AI stands in marketing today
Start with the honest baseline. Everyday use of AI in marketing is now ordinary rather than experimental, and it falls into two buckets. The first is making things: ad copy, social posts, emails, images, and now full video. On 19 May 2026 Google put its Veo 3 video and Imagen 4 image models on its business cloud for marketing teams, and its Gemini Omni model edits video from a plain-language instruction (Google Cloud).
The second bucket is running campaigns: deciding who sees an ad, what to bid, and where the budget goes. That work used to need a skilled media buyer, the person who plans and manages paid ads. It is the part now being handed to software.
Still mostly hype is the idea that AI runs your marketing end to end while you watch. It drafts, suggests, and acts inside limits you set, but the judgment about what to say, to whom, and why stays yours.
Side one: how customers find you
For two decades the way to get found was search engine optimisation, or SEO: arranging your website to rank near the top of Google's results and earn clicks. That assumption is cracking. On 20 May 2026 Google said its AI Mode, the version of search that answers a question directly instead of listing links, passed one billion monthly users in its first year (Search Engine Journal). When the answer sits at the top, fewer people scroll to anyone's site. ChatGPT and Perplexity do the same inside their own apps.
The effect is showing up in traffic. On 14 May 2026 HubSpot launched a free dashboard to track how often a brand is named in AI answers, noting that ChatGPT referrals to business websites hit a twelve-month low that April (ppc.land). Marketers call the response answer engine optimisation, or AEO: getting cited inside the AI's answer rather than ranked in a list of links. Era Haus watched the same pattern reach property in AI is reaching the buyer before the agent does: the assistant now meets the buyer before any agent. In marketing it meets your customer before your website.
Side two: how you buy attention
The buying side moved in the same month. At its Marketing Live event on 20 May 2026 Google rebuilt its advertising tools around Gemini, its AI model. The centrepiece, Ask Advisor, is a single assistant sitting across Google Ads, Analytics, and Google's shopping tools that plans campaigns, reads the results, and proposes the next move in plain conversation (Google; Search Engine Land). Google also began placing ads inside AI Mode answers. The skilled setup and tuning of a campaign is being absorbed into the agent.
Earlier in May, OpenAI opened the other big front door. It moved ChatGPT advertising to a self-serve manager and, per trade coverage, dropped the $50,000 minimum that had gated the early pilot, adding pay-per-click pricing, where you pay only when someone clicks, alongside paying simply for the ad to be shown (AdExchanger; WebFX). Put plainly: a small business can now buy ads inside ChatGPT on a normal budget, much as it already buys Google or Meta ads.
What it means for you
Two shifts, one consequence. The craft a small team or agency has sold for years, ranking a site and managing ad campaigns well, is being automated on the buying side and bypassed on the discovery side at once. When an agent can plan a competent Google campaign and the ad systems open to a few hundred dollars, "we run your ads" is a weaker thing to charge for. When the customer takes an answer from an AI that may never name you, ranking tactics matter less than being a source the AI trusts enough to cite.
That points to where the value goes, and it is the case Era Haus made in Defensibility in the AI era: when a skill becomes cheap and common, worth moves to what does not copy. In marketing that is positioning, a clear point of view, original data or research an AI has to cite, and the trust of a client who wants a person accountable, not a dashboard. The agency that only managed an ad account is exposed. The one that shapes what a business stands for keeps its value.
What to do about it
First, find out whether AI answers mention you at all. Ask ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, and Perplexity the questions your customers actually ask, such as "best [your service] in [your city]", and see who gets named. If it is not you, clear, factual, well-structured pages an AI can quote are how you earn a place in the answer, and free trackers like HubSpot's now measure it.
Second, treat the new ad surfaces as cheap experiments, not a plan. They are new enough that nobody has trustworthy benchmarks, and reported prices have already swung. Put a small, capped budget into one, measure the return against your other channels, and scale only if it holds.
What to watch rather than act on yet: handing a campaign fully to an agent like Ask Advisor. An AI optimising toward a number it was given can quietly spend toward the wrong goal. Let it suggest and assist, but keep a person approving its spending until you have seen it work on your accounts.
The pattern underneath
The same shift reached law and property in recent weeks, and the shape is identical: AI gets cheap inside the tools a profession already uses, the routine craft is automated, and value moves to judgment and relationships that do not copy. Marketing's version is sharper, because it sits on top of the very thing AI is moving fastest: how people find and decide. Teams using these tools to do the old job faster will get the small win. The ones working out how to stay the answer a customer trusts are working on the real one.